“The company of women is a dangerous thing, for by it the old devil has led many from the straight path to Paradise.”

So says one chapter of the Templar Rule - so officially no, there were definitely no Templar women. The Rule also notes that it is dangerous enough to even look at a woman, much less kiss or hug one, even if she’s a relative. However, the chapter above also mentions that

“henceforth, let not ladies be admitted as sisters into the house of the Temple; the is why, very dear brothers, henceforth it is not fitting to follow this custom, that the flower of chastity is always maintained among you.”

This must mean that in the first decade of the Order, women were allowed to join. In 1129 the Order was formalized into a proper monastic order with a Rule and, apparently, women were prohibited from joining.

In this way the Templars were visibly different from the other military orders, such as the Hospitallers and later the Teutonic Order, which did allow women to join in limited capacities as “helper sisters”. Of course they weren’t allowed to fight on horseback like knights, but in the Hospitaller order they took care of the sick and injured, and they also cooked, cleaned, did laundry, etc - things that women were stereotypically supposed to do in medieval society, and men were not supposed to do. If they lived with the male members, then they had their own convent buildings, typically some distance away from the men to avoid any improper mixing (and breaking of vows of chastity).

In the Templar order, it turned out to be a bit impractical to avoid women entirely, and no one really seems to have cared when the Rule was sometimes bent or broken. Women could join if they simply wanted to live a life of prayer and contemplation, and maybe a Templar convent was the nearest available place or they had some other connection to it. Women could join especially if they were elderly, or perhaps if they were the widow of a deceased Templar knight - this probably meant that husbands and wives could join the Order at the same time (otherwise the husband would have to abandon his wife).

Sometimes there were enough Templar women in one place that they had their own separate houses. You mentioned Mühlen, but actually in that case, their convent had previously been associated with the Cistercians. In 1272 they asked to switch their association to the nearby Templar convent - so they had become nuns in one order and later switched to the Templars, rather than joining the Templars as novices.

Templar commanders who were involved in higher-level diplomacy and negotiations couldn’t avoid women either. Wealthy and powerful women sometimes donated land or money to the Order. Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, granted the Templars houses, land, and trade privileges in the important port of La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France. If they really had to avoid all women, they wouldn’t have been able to negotiate transactions like this.

Nevertheless, the Templars were known for avoiding women, and some people did think that was a little suspicious. In the early 14th century, the Templars were all arrested and the Order was eventually disbanded entirely. Essentially the Order was accused of “institutional homosexuality”. According to the confessions made by knights who had been arrested, the initiation rites for new members often included kissing each other’s bellybuttons and genitals and perhaps actual intercourse as well. In one case a knight confessed that there were women at his initiation - but he didn’t know why, and he was afraid that they were demons in disguise. These confessions were often obtained through torture, so the knights were probably telling the interrogators whatever they wanted to hear.

Another knight confessed that the Templars were abusing their female members and forcing them to break their vows of chastity. This was somewhat expected for knights in medieval society; they were stereotypically lusty and even if Templars were supposed to be celibate, they were still knights and they would probably still chase after women. But if they weren’t allowed to be around women, maybe they were lusting after each other instead? So the interrogators focused on the accusations of homosexuality and apparently no one thought the accusations of raping women were worth investigating further. But this does at least show that there were a few Templar women and the no one found that too unexpected or unusual.

So in short, women were officially forbidden from joining the Templar Order. There were a few who joined anyway, but the Templars were particularly known for their almost complete avoidance of women.

Sources:

Fortunately for us this has been a pretty popular topic recently:

Alan Forey, “Women and the military orders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”, in Studia Monastica 29 (1987).

Helen J. Nicholson, “Templar attitudes towards women,” in Medieval History 1.3 (1991)

Helen J. Nicholson, “The Military Orders and Their Relations with Women”, in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, ed. Z. Hunyadi and J. Laszlovsky (Budapest, 2001)

Helen J. Nicholson, “Women in Templar and Hospitaller commanderies”, in La Commanderie: Institution des ordres militaires dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. A. Luttrell and L. Pressouyre (Paris, 2002)

Francesco Tommasi, “Uomini e donne negli Ordini Militari di Terrasanta: per il problema delle case doppie e miste negli Ordini giovannita, templare e teutonico (secc. XII–XIV)”, in Doppelklöster und andere Formen der Symbiose männlicher und weiblicher Religiosen in Mittelalter, ed. Kaspar Elm and Michel Parisse (Berlin, 1992)

For the Templars in general:

Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Judith Mary Upton-Ward, The Rule of the Templars (Boydell, 1997)

And for the same issue but with the Hospitallers, see

Anthony Luttrell and Helen J. Nicholson, eds., Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2006) (Forey’s and Tommasi’s articles dealing with the Templars are also reprinted here - Luttrell translated Tommasi’s article into English)

Myra Bom, Women in the Military Orders of the Crusades (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) (despite the title this is actually just about the Hospitallers)